Feed, written by M. T. Anderson in 2002, is not only a love story but also a satirical novel of consumer culture. Anderson pictures an imaginary world where “Feed” was implanted in humans’ brain as a chip connecting to the internet and loading tons of information, thus, “Everyone is supersmart” (47). School, which should be a place to learn, but was run by the corporations to teach kids mainly how to use feeds. Through the narrator, Titus, readers can visualize how people were obsessed and shaped by the popping-out ads: “I wanted so much, that all of the prices were coming into my brain, and it was like bam bam bam, like fudge-joy” (35). They kept consuming by what feed defined as cool and “in”, and fell into a circle of temporary satisfaction and eternal vacancy.
The story starts from Titus’ journey to the moon, where he met Violet, a special and smart girl, who had an extremely different background and thought from their generation. Having similarity in some aspects of expressing and thinking, Titus was attracted by her and they started dating after the invasion by the hacker. They experienced together the recovery, differences of life expectation and frustration of relationship. After being informed of her irreparable feed damage, Violet refused to be sorted into any consumer’s type by frustrating the feed, and insisted to live in an ideal way without feed’s credits, which directly pushed Titus to face the dilemma of whether to follow the past value that feed had fed him or to follow the new belief of independent thinking that Violet showed him. Meanwhile, feeling scared about losing Violet and unconfident of dealing with it, Titus chose an easier but negative way he thought would minimize his fear and sorrow: going into mal, deleting Violet’s message, purchasing stuff frantically, and blaming Violet cold-bloodedly. Finally, Violet died with despair and loneliness. In the last scene, Titus was regretfully crying next to dying Violet and realizing the importance of their love and the meaning of life.
By the story, I think Mr. Anderson did make a powerful warning to people who have not perceived the strong effect of the consumer culture, under which people impulsively worshiped the mono “cool” value that feed broadcasted. The characters in the story valued themselves by purchasing what feed advertised to them and mimicking each other without deliberation. The girls considered themselves sexy when having exaggerated “brag” lesions on their bodies and faces, even those really made them feel uncomfortable and stupid. Some parents replicated their children from celebrities: Link was a clone of Abraham Lincoln, and Titus was produced from the prototype of an actor. People were departed from the central essence of life and the true joy. They sank into the vicious circle of short happiness and dissatisfaction: “Quendy bought some shoes, but the minute she walked out of the store she didn’t want them anymore”(31). Thus, the desire for materials becomes an immense black hole in mind, so people have to carry on buying to gain happiness and self-fulfillment. As Titus figured out why his upcar couldn’t be the top priority for his friends to ride in, he said, “It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it. I felt like I’d been running toward it for a long time” (279). In society, we can detect this similar phenomenon existed as well. People keep pursuing newer and more advanced stuff as better cars, laptops, mobile phones and i-pod nanos, in order to label themselves cool and hardly stop this behavior. This explained the reason that Violet voiced out loud when seeing Quendy’s compulsive behavior of having brag lesions on her body, ”You’re feed! You’re being eaten! You’re raised for food!”(202).
Language metamorphosis, to some degrees, can reflect the effect of consumer culture as well. Manipulated by commercial ads, language is no longer used for communicating meaning and sharing emotion, but for selling and fulfilling people’s endless hollow. The main goal of commercial ads is to catch people’s attention and sell products efficiently; therefore, they invented simple but might be incorrect, abbreviated words, rhythmic sentences, or slogans. “Hey, you wanna leave your boyf with his head spinning? Then checkout what Laucia, our lady o’ love, has to say about these chicks, and their sich in the sach” (189). Mr. Anderson strongly denounced the way ads exploit language. Via Violet’s father, who intentionally used complicated and difficult words, he resisted to speak in this simple way as the ads usually do-- “He tried to speak entirely in weird words and irony, so no one can simplify anything he says” (137). Another example of deteriorating language use under consumer culture was showing when Titus and his friends lost their feeds. They couldn’t communicate and share emotion well. Everyone just looked at each other and felt bored for several days. Same condition happened when Titus’ father failed to m-chat with Titus, he had difficulty speaking fluently but said short repetitive words like ”Oh yeah”, “yeah”, “okay”, and “shit” instead. This kind of meaningless words and styles in language influenced by Consumer’s culture, furthermore, isolated people from deeper level interaction, in which capable of sharing meaning and emotion played an important role. In the last chapter, Marty got a Nike speech tattoo and spoke in a fixed style as “This fuckin’ shit Nike, funkin’, you know, Nike” (278). The way he conducted speaking made people hardly comprehend and response. What I saw in teenagers’ sub-culture of mastering language, they adopted these abbreviated words or symbols in substitute of emotional expression as well: “ : P ” means happy and “Orz” represents admiration. People who didn’t use this way to communicate couldn’t be accepted and built relationship with these people. Besides, in oral English, words like “man”, “buddy” “you know” occupied high percentage of language use. Getting accustomed to it, people have less and less chance to detect their intricate feelings, to digest information and to think further before speaking out.
As mentioned above, the consumer culture shaped the way people behave, think, use language and express feeling. Gradually, I see people become shallow and repetitive speaking machine without real emotional interaction. In this way, how can people be kind to others and or willing to support, encourage and help each other mutually? It’s not only a deterioration of language, but also a decline of humans’ collective mind and spirit; therefore, it’s never too early for human beings to pay attention to this issue.
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